LIT/A/3: Bleak House -Charles Dickens

Bleak House (1853) is one of five novels Dickens wrote in a decade at the peak of his creative power. It has sixty or so characters, two narrators (one ‘omniscient’ but another in the first person), multiple plotlines in every mode from murder mystery to romance, and settings ranging from the aristocratic Dedlock country seat to Tom-All-Alone’s slum tenement in London. Illegitimacy, disease, poverty, child-labour and crippling addiction to a fantasy of closure afflict a cast of people all caught up in the confused law case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce that is dragging on through the ancient Court of Chancery. Bleak House is a condition-of-England novel and the picture it shows is grim.